


Spinning the World

by calumTraveler



Category: Milo Murphy's Law, Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Brockton Bay will never be the same, Crossover, Gen, Simurgh's watching on with awe, Slow Updates, Sortof a retread of the first episode, an idea that just wouldn't leave me be, bad people getting caught up in a bad luck field, dominoes for murphy's law!, escalation (but not in the way you usually see in a worm fic), kind of, mild swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-21 22:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11953848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calumTraveler/pseuds/calumTraveler
Summary: Missy heads to school and meets an interesting new classmate.





	1. Obligatory Introductions

Part of the reason that Missy Biron was excited for school today, unlike some other days, was that her school would be getting a new transfer student in today- as in, transferring in from out of town! People NEVER moved to Brockton Bay unless they absolutely couldn't help it. So, at the very least, there would be somebody waiting at school for her to try and befriend and cheer up about leaving their life behind!  
  
The other reason that Missy Biron was excited for today, was that her parents had both forgotten that they'd be taking her to school today, but the PRT thought that she would be taken there by her parents, and so, for once in a rare blue moon, the Ward Vista would be going to school on her own two feet today. Maybe she'd take the bus for once?  
  
Or, maybe she'd leap across the town's buildings rooftops and stretch her power's legs for a while.  
  
Nah. The bus sounded much more fun. And so she walked to the nearest bus-stop that would go to her school.  
  
There were a lot of familiar and unfamiliar faces waiting there at the stop, Missy noted, including some students who were likely going to Winslow High as well (It was on the same bus route). Wow! She'd be riding with the big kids for once! (Ha!)  
  
There were a lot of glum faces, especially among the people going to Winslow, and nobody really seemed in a good mood except... except for this one boy around her age. Maybe a bit older, or maybe just oddly tall for his age. Either way, he was smiling and looking around at everything with wide, fresh eyes. He was also standing quite a bit away from everyone else.  
  
_'Well, hello new transfer student,'_ Missy thought to herself as she meandered over to him. "Hi there!"  
  
"Oh! Hi!" The boy smiled as he greeted her back. "Are you going to..." He quickly reached back into his rather large backpack and pulled out a piece of paper and asked her if she was going to the same middle school he was.  
  
Missy's answer was, "Yes, yes I am going to that very same middle school."  
  
"Oh, awesome," the boy said, putting the piece of paper back into his backpack. "I'm Milo," he offered his hand for a shake, which Missy did.  
  
"Missy!"  
  
"Missy? Huh. Close to Melissa," the boy- Milo- mused absently, staring off into the distance for a moment before smiling again. "Well, it's a pleasure to meet you Missy." He paused, "Ah, but you probably want to stand a bit more over with the other people."  
  
"Why's that?" Missy asked.  
  
"Well, it's been a weird morning so far," Milo said, "nothing's gone wrong at all!"  
  
"Huh, yeah that is kinda weird for Brockton Bay," Missy agreed. The town was a trouble magnet with a capital "T.M."  
  
"Huh? Oh, no, I mean with me, personally." Milo looked around, narrowing his eyes at a distant construction site. "Something usually goes wrong by now. It's putting me a little bit on edge."  
  
"Maybe that's a good sign? You're going to a new school, so maybe it's time for a fresh start!" Missy offered.  
  
"...Nah. It just means something big is coming." Milo said that disturbing sentence with a rather enthusiastic cheer. "There's always just another thing coming." That was when there was a sudden yelp from the construction site, and Milo reached into his backpack, retrieving a pair of bicycle helmets, one of which he handed to her. "If you're not going to back away, please put this on."  
  
"Uh, okay," Missy did such, even as other people waiting at the bus stop finally started to take notice of this impending disaster. "Why?"  
  
"Just trust me on this one," Milo answered mere moments before there was an explosion of water from the construction site, and a giant concrete tube went flying through the air. Milo seemed to tense, bracing for impact, and Missy, for a single moment, forgot about her powers of spatial manipulation as she saw that giant thing tumbling end over end as if being drawn like a magnet towards their position.  
  
Then, she remembered her powers, and with a subtle twitch of her right hand, a spatial warp sent the concrete tube rebounding off in a different direction.  
  
"Huh," Milo blinked, as if surprised. "That's different."  
  
"Different?" Missy asked, surprised. "What do you mean 'different'!? That thing was coming right at us!?"  
  
"Exactly! And then it suddenly changed directions!" Milo said, staring after the concrete tube as it landed, not on them, but instead in the middle of a used car store's lot. Car alarms all sounded in a cacophonous resonance, and not a few seconds later, someone decided to take advantage of the incident to steal a car, driving off of the lot with it at reckless speeds...  
  
Right. Towards. Them.  
  
"Hey, you might wanna jump back a few feet," Milo said, loudly, to warn everyone else at the bus-stop. They all did so, well, except for him and Missy, who just couldn't figure out how the hell something like this could even be going on. "And we're jumping..." Milo said as he grabbed Missy's hand. "NOW!" and so she jumped right as he said, and somehow, they wound up not smeared on the car's front windshield, but instead on the roof of the car itself.  
  
"Wha- How?!" Missy couldn't believe it.  
  
"HEY! GET OFF MY CAR YOU CHICKENS!" The car thief yelled, sticking a rather grimy left hand and middle finger up out the window at them.  
  
_'Wait what!? Is that... Squealer!?'_ Missy's brain recognized the female voice as the Merchant's Tinker. Of COURSE she'd steal a freaking car off of a used car lot in the panic of a giant concrete tube landing in it.  
  
"Don't mind us! Just hitching a ride!" Milo happily informed the driver.  
  
"SCREW YOU!!" Squealer, who didn't normally use that polite language, seemed to be at least in some moderate control of herself for once. Sober? Unlikely, but somewhere closer to that side, all things considered. She went around a corner rapidly- but not TOO rapidly- as if in an attempt to scare them off rather than shake them off.  
  
That was when Missy heard another explosion of water, and someone cried out, "NOT AGAIN!" Milo and Missy looked up and saw, with great dismay, that another giant concrete tube was rolling down the street after them at high speeds.  
  
"Well that's something you don't see every day!" Milo remarked casually, then, As he started digging around inside his backpack for something, said to the driver, "Hey! You might want to go faster or else you'll get run over!"  
  
"WHAAAT?!"  
  
"LOOK IN THE REAR VIEW!" Missy yelled at the woman, who did such, and finally shouted something more familiar as the Merchant's common vernacular.  
  
And so Squealer put pedal to the metal, and her stolen car ran forwards at higher speeds.  
Milo, in that moment, withdrew what seemed to be a bungee cord, and looped it up like a lasso, before swinging it out at a flag pole sticking out of a building they were just about to pass under.  
  
The Bungee Lasso caught onto the pole, and as it went past them, Milo grabbed Missy and they were both pulled off of the roof of the car, and sent swinging backwards- almost on an arc that should have safely put them on the side- **_SNAP_** -walk?  
  
A second later, Missy found herself running alongside Milo ontop of the second giant concrete tube.  
  
"Okay, now I feel like they're purposefully making these things defective!" Milo said, annoyed, as he stared at the snapped bungie cord in his hands.  
  
He then threw it over his shoulder and it landed who knows where.  
  
"WHAT'S EVEN HAPPENING HERE!?" Missy shouted at Milo- having had just about enough of this. "HOW ARE YOU SO CALM!?"  
  
"Ah! Well, you see, that's a bit of a long story," Milo casually answered. "Also, try not to scream. it's horrible on the vocal chords." He frowned. "I feel like I've said that a lot, actually."  
  
Missy wisely kept her next response to a more, less shouty, but none the less panicked tone of voice. "No! But seriously! How are you so Calm!? Are you a Cape or something!?"  
  
Milo laughed. "Hah! As if! Me? A Parahuman? No way!" He just smiled, and re-extended his hand, "Milo Murphy. As in, Murphy's Law? He's my ancestor. All the men in my family are cursed, and he was the first."  
  
Missy stared blankly, dully shook the boy's hand, and then realized that she and him were STILL running on top of a giant concrete tube that was somehow picking up speed and gaining ground on Squealer's stolen car.  
  
"AAAAH! DO SOMETHING THEN!?" Missy shouted, half not wanting to use her powers obviously in a way that'd out her, and half wanting to use them just so that she could get off this crazy ride already.  
  
"Okay okay, no need to shout my ear off!" Milo didn't seem offended at all, and instead withdrew what seemed to be a... a Skateboard!? How the hell did a SKATEBOARD fit inside of a backpack like that!? "Aaaand-- JUMP!" On his signal, they jumped backwards, landed somehow on the skateboard ON the pavement, and let the friction of the road slow them down even as the large concrete tube continued rolling away down the street after the unfortunate Squealer.  
  
"...I..." Missy stared after the bizarre sight. "...And you say this is what usually happens to you?"  
  
"Pretty much!" Milo nodded. "Although, we should probably have this conversation on the sidewalk and not the middle of a street."  
  
"Right." Missy nodded, and followed the boy back to the sidewalk, where they then resumed an almost casual walk down the street towards their middle school, even despite all the horrified looks the nearby pedestrians were giving them.  
  
"So yeah, basically, my family's cursed with Murphy's law," Milo explained, shoving the skateboard back into his backpack. "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Often in the most insane ways possible. It's been like that since I was born, for my dad since he was born, so on, so forth. You get the picture."  
  
Missy blinked. "But... How?"  
  
"No clue!" Milo shrugged. "We just live with it. My dad's a safety inspector! One of the best because all the things that could go wrong- do! And he can fix them. That's actually why we're here in Brockton Bay. Dad got hired to come in and supervise the refurbishing of something big. I think I heard the ferry? Or maybe it was something to do with the docks?" He shrugged. "Well, either way, for sure it's going to get done with my Dad here on the job."  
  
"And the backpack...?" Missy stared at it.  
  
"Oh, I like to be prepared," Milo answered. "Really, really prepared. Multiples of just about anything you could possibly need to escape anything, just in case the first one or two break." He pulled out a hedge trimmer- the center screw of which fell out the moment he opened the two scissor like blades. "...See what I mean?"  
  
He threw the broken hedge trimmer back into his backpack as if he could still get use out of the pieces later.  
  
"...I guess, yeah," Missy said. "But... I just... How are you so calm?"  
  
"What's the use of panicking?" Milo shrugged. "Things happen to me so constantly that my life is never boring! Like, everyone else back at that bus stop took the BUS to school! But us? We got to ride on the roof of a car and run on top of a concrete what-cha-ma-call-it!" Punctuating that sentence was the sound of a distant crashing car, and someone squealing in anger and dismay. "How can that not be more..." He paused. "Wait, are we going up hill?"  
  
Missy nodded, then, paled, as she too realized what that meant.  
  
Both of them looked up the road towards the place where the concrete tube had definitely come to a crashing halt against Squealer's car, but wasn't staying there. Instead? It was now rolling backwards- DOWN HILL- at them.  
  
Milo had the skateboard out again within a second- except a wheel fell off. And then another. And then the other two.  
  
"...The wheel bolts were clearly broken from the last time we used this!" Milo said with an amused tone of voice as he dropped the board on the ground. And then he and Missy turned tail and ran down the street, away from the concrete roller that was picking up steam again.  
  
Pedestrians were all dodging to the sides, taking cover in buildings or along side streets.  
  
"Is the universe USUALLY this persistent in trying to kill you!?" Missy asked as they dodged a car that had swerved onto the sidewalk in terror.  
  
"Pretty much!" Milo answered with a chipper nod.  
  
"How did you even survive being a baby!?" Missy asked, horrified.  
  
"I had the best babysitter in the world!" Milo answered, proudly.  
  
Well, Missy supposed, that did make sense to some degree.  
  
And then, as they were running down the street, Missy saw an opportunity to stealthily use her powers. Two large car carrying trucks were abandoned almost perfectly in alignment with the concrete tube rolling after them. If she used her powers as she passed to make some spatial ramps, it would seem like the trucks themselves had supported the concrete tubes and made it into a ramp.  
  
And so she did, trying to mask her hand gestures as flailing arms as she ran.  
  
Two ramps, one concrete tube, and inertia met, with the end result of the concrete tube flying into the air, disappearing into the clouds above. Missy and Milo stopped running, and Missy let her powers go on those ramps as she panted for breath.  
  
"Well, that certainly got some distance going for it," Milo said, hand raised to his eyes to shield them from the sun as he tried to follow the path of the concrete tube. "I wonder where it's going to land?"  


* * *

  
  
Elsewhere in the city, a certain Dynamic Duo were discussing themes for their next show.  
  
"Grand Theft Auto?"  
  
"Nah. We did that already. Bad ratings and bad rep, remember?"  
  
"...Half Life?"  
  
"Too many chances we'd get the real military called in."  
  
"What about-?"  
  
There was a crash from outside, and Uber and Leet turned to look out the window to see that a large concrete tube had landed perfectly on its side. Inspiration struck like a head on a floating block.  
  
"...Mario Bros?" Uber suggested.  
  
"You know it, my man." Leet answered.


	2. Riling up a Beehive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coil sips some coffee and considers hiring better mercenaries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reworked this Spinning the World segment, tried to make it more obvious that the curse was just using everyone else to rile up everyone else so that Milo could get in a situation where he might get killed. It's the same general string of events as the last version, but with a few tweaked details to make it flow better and make it more obvious what was happening.

It had barely been a full eight days since Milo Murphy had transferred to Missy Biron's school when a disaster large enough to shut it down completely finally happened.  
  
It started that morning with a phone call from the school board, citing that the entire school would be shut down for the remainder of the week while the city dealt with a surprise gas leak. Everyone from that school, from the lowest grade to the highest, would be transferred around the city for the remainder of the time and would be merged "with the big kid classes" to give them all a taste of High School.  
  
Missy was somewhat annoyed by the condescending tone on the prerecorded message, but that annoyance quickly gave way on the bus ride to school that morning (Her parents once again forgetting who was taking her, a welcome occurrence, if Missy had any say in the matter) upon seeing how upbeat Milo was.  
  
"You seem happy," Missy noted.  
  
"My Dad got called in off of his current job since he's in town to help fix the gas leak," Milo explained. "Apparently the City Mayor's taking no chances with his niece's school!"  
  
"The Mayor's Niece goes to our school?" Missy blinked, wondering when the hell that had happened. "When did that happen?"  
  
"This week, actually," said a girl from the row in front of them- she stood up, turned around, and grinned back at them with a strangely happy smile. "Dinah Alcott!" She offered her hands to Missy and Milo. "I did the numbers before leaving my house and today seems like it's going to be a really great day!"  
  
"Oh, I'm sure it's going to be Exceptional!" Milo said as he took the younger girl's right hand and shook it. "I'm Milo Murphy."  
  
"Missy Biron," Missy said, shaking the girl's left hand in a weird loop around that would have felt awkward even with her space warping powers.  
  
Somehow, Missy was less focused on the oddity that was the Mayor's niece going to school with them, and more on the perplexing cheer the younger girl had for going to Winslow Highschool, of all places.  
  
What kind of math did this girl run this morning, exactly? Because really, hanging around Milo it was more likely you'd be hit by a car out of the blue than blown up by a gas leak in a school.  


* * *

  
Elsewhere in Brockton Bay, a certain supervillain with a snake motif sat down at his two different desks, sipped at his coffee in two different timelines, and began operations for the day.  
  
Both, naturally, ran a fowl of the sudden change in student rosters across the city.  
  
"Well, that's weird," Coil frowned in one timeline. But not unexpected, really, as it had happened during the middle of the night while he was asleep. No real chance of butterflying it away had been given. Still, he adjusted. In the timeline of his Civilian Self, Thomas Calvert planned to do nothing. His plans to kidnap the Mayor's recently triggered Niece at school today would be adjusted and attempted in the second timeline only. If things went wrong, which, really, they probably would given the sheer amount of new variables he'd been experiencing this last week in his throwaway timelines, then he could just drop it and live with it.  
  
His plan set into motion in the throwaway timeline with a confirmation from his men, Thomas Calvert sat back in his office in the PRT building, and sipped at his coffee. Yes, today was going to be a GREAT day. He would get the girl who'd apparently triggered in the Uber and Leet show that went disastrously wrong over the weekend, and he would forever be unstop-  
  
In that moment, however, a very large SOMETHING slammed into his PRT office window, and poor Thomas choked on his coffee- accidentally closing the safe timeline in the process.  
Eyes snapping to attention is his once throwaway timeline, Coil split timelines once more- keeping the events set in motion in the first one, and canceling them in the second.  
  
That had been a stupid move. _'A very, **very** stupid move.'_ He thought as he exited his lair's office in his now safe timeline. What was it that had even hit his office window in the first place? In the once again throw-away timeline, Coil looked up the news and saw...  
  
"What the fuhhh...?"  
  
It had been one of the missing props from the Uber and Leet show that last weekend. One of the Giant Blue Koopa shells that Uber had thrown at the ward Vista, who had been first on the scene, who had then used her space powers to send it flying upwards into the atmosphere, thought to never be seen again.  
  
...Well, apparently it had decided to come back down days later against Calvert's favored windowed office in the PRT building.  
  
That was... Unexpected. Very unexpected, and it was completely unavoidable in both timelines just like the school's gas leak had been.  
  
Coil suddenly had a premonition in his safe timeline- what if more disasters like that were going to happen? Surely he could safely figure out how to avoid them entirely by-  
  
In that moment, as Coil was walking down a recently polished hallway, he slipped on a rag one of his mercenaries had been using to do the polishing and wound up slipping and falling down one of his lair's staircases.  
  
His safe timeline once again crashed to a close, leaving poor Coil sitting in his office once more, staring blankly at his computer screen, wondering what the hell had just happened.  
  
Splitting timelines once again, Coil kept the job going in the other, and ended it in the new one, and hoped that things would have a better outcome this time.  
  
Also, he would definitely be avoiding that hallway this time.  
  
It would take three more failed "Safe" timelines where he canceled the mission before he realized that the universe was almost certainly pushing him towards completing the job he'd set in motion and just... didn't cancel it again, even in future split timelines.  
  
After that, everything went on smooth sailing and nothing seemed to be out to get him.  
Suddenly, Coil had the premonition that he knew exactly who was doing this to him to further her own goals. (He was actually wrong on that regard, but he wouldn't dare even ask Contessa to find out if he was right.)  


* * *

  
  
Winslow Highschool was... not at all what Missy was expecting. For starters, it was clear everyone was trying to be on their best behavior- the staff especially- and that made Missy suspicious, especially when accidentally passing fellow ward, Sophia Hess/Shadow Stalker in the halls, who immediately stopped talking and tried to shoosh the other girls in her clique before they said anything more about some planned prank.  
  
Pranks? That surely had to be against her probation. But, maybe it wasn't too bad if the school wasn't doing anything about it... but then again, they seemed to be in CYOA mode. Without any direct action, Missy wasn't sure she could do anything about it.  
  
And that was all before Milo's family curse kicked in, setting up the dominoes in a way that was rapidly becoming clear that the lack of events directly targeting him today were setting up for something rather catastrophic. It was like the Curse was trying to rile up the school's beehive like nature to deadly proportions. Milo was acutely aware of it, and Missy's Wards trained instincts were blaring danger in the back of her mind all day.  
  
For some reason a swarm of birds of all types were hanging around the school- rumor was that they'd been growing in number since January, but today was the largest anybody had seen of them yet. Some kid named Greg in math class was theorizing that a Bird Controlling Master had triggered and was slowly building up their army for revenge purposes.  
  
The obvious gang members were finding their lockers mysterious filled up with rival gang paraphernalia. Teachers were having some of these wild birds flying in through any given window at a moment's notice to peck at their hair (Of course, today would be the day that all of the window locks at the school seemed to have broken). And then half way through the morning, something had happened with the Principal's car- word was that it was missing, possibly stolen.  
  
As the day progressed, small, minor things that may have just inconvenienced other people happened whenever they got close to Milo as well, but nothing to the scale of what had been happening this last week. (And especially not when Uber and Leet's car had practically exploded when she and Milo had walked by it just before that Mario themed show had begun.)  
  
First, a drinking fountain exploded on some girl named Madison when she'd cut in front of the girl at the head of the line- who had only been one ahead of Milo. The end result had been Madison being flung backwards and would have hit Milo and everyone else behind him had Milo not jumped to the side and the water stream followed, shoving Madison after him like a Milo seeking missile.  
  
Then, during Lunch, some girl named Julia ended up with a can of soda exploding in her hand when she tried to rush past Milo and Missy in the cafeteria on her way to the restroom or something. A restroom which she, Missy, and Milo all now need actually because of the soda covering them all.  
  
Finally, before Gym, as they headed to one of the nearby restrooms, there was an explosion of sound from the girl's room that sounded like one of the stalls had collapsed on someone. A few moments later, one of the girls Missy had seen in Sophia's clique, a redhead by the name of Emma, ended up storming out of one of the girls' bathrooms covered in pudding and other gunk, to which Missy looked to Milo, and he shrugged before heading into the boys room.  
Missy looked inside the girls room, and saw Sophia and that Madison girl clambering out of ruined stalls, while some other familiar looking girl Missy hadn't heard the name of yet looked like she'd nearly been crushed by the domino effect of the stalls collapsing around her.  
  
Whatever the case was going on here- prank or not- Milo's curse had aggravated Sophia so much to the point that she didn't even notice that Missy had walked in.  
  
And an Angry Sophia was not one Missy wanted to deal with.  
  
All in all, a fairly light day as far as disasters were going for Milo, but with the curse seeming to be targeting everybody else in this school today, riling up an aggravated situation to a boiling point... What was going to happen that it needed everyone so horribly angry? It didn't bode well for Milo, that was for sure.  
  
Come gym class, though, Sophia, Emma, and that Madison girl seemed to have had enough of this chaos, and went explicitly towards that girl from the bathroom- as well as being the girl who got cut in front of at the drinking fountain. Whatever was going on to aggravate those girls was using this girl as a leverage point.  
  
"Hebert! What the fuck did you?!" She'd hissed- quietly, but not quietly enough for a subtle spatial warp to let Missy eaves drop on the conversation.  
  
"Uh... laugh as everything you girls tried to do to me backfired horribly for some reason?" the other girl asked in response, though it was somewhat cut back and timidly measured- the likely after result of nearly being crushed by a bunch of bathroom stalls.  
  
"Listen, Taylor! Just because you think you can get away with this with a bunch of other students here to keep us in line, doesn't mean you'll always have them to-"  
  
Emma was cut off by Milo suddenly yelling in surprise as the bin of Dodgeballs broke apart, dumping most of its contents on top of him- or it would have if he didn't jump to the side, lunging for where he'd left his backpack for class activities- and sending bouncy orange spherical salutes everywhere in the gym.  
  
Missy didn't even think to redirect any of the dodgeballs with her powers- but the trajectory one bouncy orb of destruction traversed the room as if she had. Hit the floor- bounce up, hit that Madison girl again in the back of her chest- then flew across the room- hit that Julia girl in the leg- rebounded and smacked Emma in the head- and then it lazily floated up into the air as Madison and Emma collapsed to the ground, before drifting down into this Taylor Hebert girl's hands.  
  
Sophia and Taylor just stared for a few moments, both at the downed girls, and then back to the dodgeball that had caused all of this.  
  
Suddenly realizing what she had in her hands, Taylor dropped it like it was made of lava. It didn't even bounce that much after it's previous showing.  
  
Sophia roared- "HEBERT! I'M GONNA--!" It was then that Sophia went to step angrily forwards, only to misstep, slip on the dodgeball, and fall on her back as the dodgeball shot off towards one of the gym's entrances.  
  
It just so happened at that moment that was when the group of Mercenaries burst through the door, and their leader got hit in his unprotected gut with that very same dodgeball.  


* * *

  
  
At that very moment, Coil found himself suddenly dealing with one of his servants barging into his office and distracting him in both currently active timelines, once more keeping him from any last second cold feet decisions to cancel the job to kidnap Dinah Alcott.  


* * *

  
  
The mercenaries were all staring at their now unconscious leader, and so were too distracted to notice that the doors they'd just burst open were teetering precariously on their hinges.  
  
They fell a moment later, but not on the mercenaries or on anybody else. Oh no, Missy and Milo both stared on as the doors somehow launched up several loosened floorboards, catapulting even more dodgeballs straight into the mercenaries faces. On impact induced instinct, all of them pulled the triggers on their Tinker-tech rifles, and lasers shot out in all directions...  
  
..."All directions" in this case being the same direction that the rebounded dodgeballs were now taking: hurtling straight back upon Milo.  
  
Missy ran, subtly warping space to close the distance faster, and then pulled her friend to the ground to avoid the shotgun blast of dodgeballs and deadly lasers.  
  
"Well!" Milo chipperly remarked in a fast paced "That was a new one! Never had lasers shot at me before!" Missy watched, then as the dodgeballs all hit the wall behind Milo again- "All I've got are four tiny hand mirrors!" and then rebounded straight back onto the Mercenaries that were trying to get back to their feet. "I should pack some larger mirrors next time!" Bounce to the head, rebound again, and lasers fired off all again- once more straight at Milo. "I'd need something larger like a shield or- Or a bathroom mirror!" He gasped. "Aw Crud! All of the ones in the boy's bathroom were broken!"  
  
Missy threw her hands out as if to protect herself from the onslaught, but instead was just a cover to force the dodgeballs to spread subtly enough to go around both her and Milo and redirected the lasers up into the ceiling.  
  
That was when Principal Blackwell burst into the gym, yelling about an evacuation... and got pummeled in the bouncy orange balls of death. A moment later, some of the gym's ceiling tiles fell down on her after being shot by the lasers.  
  
_'Whoops,'_ Missy grimaced. ...That was an accident, wasn't it? Like... None of that would have hit the Principal if not for Missy redirecting space in front of her like that.  
  
"Arrgh... What the hell!?" The lead Mercenary yelled, grabbing at his stomach- "JUST GET THE GIRL!!! YOU IDIOTS!! CAN'T DO ANYTHING RIGHT!"  
  
Girl? What girl?  
  
Missy's eyes widened as she spotted Dinah slipping out of the gym past the dazed Principal.  
  
Dinah. Of course. The Mayor's niece! Suddenly it all began to make sense! Mercenaries sent to kidnap the girl disable her school's security by staging a gas leak, then come here to kidnap her! That part had nothing to do with Milo's super powered curse at all!  
  
(She'd later learn that no, the Mercenaries had been planning to kidnap Dinah at her own school in the first place and had to change their plans around the move to a new location.)  
  
Which meant either things were about to go _**horribly wrong**_ , or _**horribly right.**_ And as the Mercenaries all got to their feet, Missy grabbed Milo off the floor and tore off after Dinah, her training as a Ward yelling at her to make sure that this curse of everything going wrong would target exactly the right people for once.  
  
"You know! Mercenaries!" Milo quipped as they ran through the halls. "I've never had mercenaries shooting at me before! The government usually stays out of my town, for obvious reasons. Hehe."  
  
"Gee, I wonder why!" Missy laughed.  
  
Interestingly, Director Piggot had gone pale when she'd mentioned to her after the Squealer incident that Milo Murphy had moved to Brockton Bay. The elder woman hadn't done anything more in that moment but stare blankly ahead, and mutter, "Oh no, not again," before ordering Vista to leave her office. Less than five seconds later, she could have been heard yelling over the phone at the Chief Director herself!  
  
Strangely, 'Vista' hadn't been scheduled for any more patrols or even console duty days for the whole month after that. Missy wasn't going to complain, though. Hanging around Milo was so much more fun than the Wards anyways. After all, in what other kind of situation was she going to run into hired Mercenaries sent to kidnap the Mayor's Niece!?  
  
Not one where she was stuck on patrol or on console duty, that's for sure.  
  
"Hey, weird question," Milo voiced as they passed by row after row of shiny, silver tinted classroom windows. "But do you think these windows are single-pane or bi-plane?"  
  
"Why would they be airplanes??" Missy asked, not quite catching the entire question.  
  
"No, I mean," Milo laughed. "OH! I see where you misheard me there. Haha! That was pretty funny!"  
  
Missy and Milo caught up with Dinah, who was panting for breath outside one of the teacher's offices- Mister Gladly, Missy thought his name was- and saw that inside, the poor teacher was being harassed by yet another flock of rambunctious crows. How they got in, nobody knew, considering that the poor man had locked the windows after the third mugging. (The locks must have failed here too for some reason.)  
  
"THERE THEY ARE!" Someone yelled from down the hall, and Milo didn't even hesitate before opening the classroom door to use as a shield- the tinker tech lasers all rebounded off of the door and into the classroom.  
  
And wouldn't you know it, the flock of crows stopped harassing the poor teacher, and looked straight at Milo, then back out into the hallway.  
  
The crows somehow looked incredibly pissed, and then took off like bats out of hell and started swarming the mercenaries.  
  
"How'd you know that would work?" Missy asked as the three of them started running again.  
  
"I noticed the door windows in this school are incredibly reflective and took a chance!" Milo answered.  
  
"None of this should be happening!!" Dinah cried out. "The numbers didn't show anything about this happening today!"  
  
"Welcome to my world!" Milo remarked happily.  
  
As they rounded the next hallway corner, however, they came face to face with a gang confrontation- the local E88 and ABB heads were snarling at each other, while the head of the local Merchants division seemed stoned out of her mind.  
  
It was then that Missy happened to figure out what happened to the Principal's car, because said car was flying straight at the wall from the outside and probably would have hit someone if she hadn't instinctively increased the space between them and the mercenary to be wide enough to not hit anyone.  
  
Of course, the car still hit the wall, and it still blew lots of dust and debris into the expanded fold of space- masking what she'd done until she let it compress back to normal under the cover of the cloud of dust.  
  
Missy didn't realize until later that evening that doing that had the side effect of crunching the car up a bit, but in that moment, the car had been so crunched up from the front back, that nobody really noticed at first how subtly crushed it was from side to side. It made for a suitably terrifying metaphor for what could have happened to Milo if he'd been standing just a few inches further forwards.  
  
Of course, the three Gang heads all turned, looked, saw the car, and then immediately started blaming eachother for this near dead experience.  
  
...Of course, that was when Shadow Stalker finally made her presence known and put a tranquilizer bolt straight in each of their backs.  
  
"...Aw... Crud." And thus, the gangsters fell.  
  
**"I've been wanting to do that _for Years,"_ ** Shadow Stalker laughed to herself. "So... what the hell even happened here?!" She then exclaimed, pointing at the car. "Who the hell steals a car just to throw it through a school wall!?"  
  
Milo shrugged. "Someone who tried very hard to kill me, I'd guess?"  
  
Dinah Alcott seemed to process that statement, blinked, 'did the math', and then went pale as she said, "Or me."  
  
"...Well, that's not helpful at all," Shadow Stalker sighed, and then slipped off into a wall without another word. Probably to hunt down some mercenaries.  


* * *

  
  
"I thought we weren't doing Half Life?" Uber asked, staring at the mockup of the Blue Gravity Gun Leet held in his hands, then to the giant hole in the wall.  
  
"We aren't," Leet said with a laugh. "We're doing Half Life 2!!"  
  
A pause for concept recognition occurred, and then-  
  
"...I love it!" Uber laughed, then stopped. "...So, uh... maybe we should turn the power on this thing down a bit. I can't see where that car even went!"  
  
"...Yeah, fair point." And with a flick of a switch, the gravity gun switched from blue to orange. "You gotta admit though, it did get some awesome air just now, didn't it?"  
  
"Yeah, for some school principals car it sure did have some great hangtime. Shame we didn't get a vide-OH!" Uber snapped his fingers. "We should TOTALLY find another car to do that with and make a video of it!"  
  
"Oh! Yes! Like a spin off series!" Leet nodded, completely agreeing with the unspoken fact that their last show had been an explosive failure for reasons that weren't related to his Tinkertech for once.  


* * *

  
  
Still within his base, Coil sipped at his coffee, only to receive the news that his mercenaries had been rounded up by Shadow Stalker of all Capes.  
  
"...Beaten by a Ward?" He shook his head. "I'm really not paying them enough for this."  
  
Oh well, for now he'd let Dinah Alcott be. At least, until he hired some more competent mercenaries, that is.  


* * *

  
Armsmaster was a man of efficient thought and action. An orderly office was an orderly job was an orderly day.  
  
It pained him to learn that the foremost source of chaos, inefficiency, and disaster had moved into town.  
  
It pained him even more to see that things had gotten so out of hand that somehow, the chaos had managed to stop more crime even despite all the random damage caused to the city.  
  
Mercenaries failing to kidnap the Mayor's niece because a stolen car was flung half-way across the city by unknown means was just the icing on top of the already weird cake.  
  
Oh, no. The weirdest part about today was seeing one of his wards just... Chatting. Casually. With both the Mayor's Niece, Dinah Alcott, and the source of at least half of the city's troubles- one Milo Murphy.  
  
He wasn't a parahuman. His family's "Curse" had been well documented to before Scion had even been a world-wide known name. This was a genuine phenomenon that, unlike Parahuman powers, just spat in the face of any semblance of normality.  
  
And here Vista was sitting with the Mayor's Niece, and ... and... this.. This source of... Of...!  
  
And he couldn't do a damned thing about it because she wasn't in costume. He didn't even dare talk to her beyond asking the standard "What did you see, Witness/Citizen?" questionaire he had his suit feed him.  
  
Oh, sure he'd be asking so many more questions once she returned to base later... but if what she'd told him in this brief report was to believed...  
  
He was being shown up in performance by one of his Wards because she was hanging around the source of almost every catastrophe this last week!  
  
How could he compete with that!?  
  
His answer was given in the form of a crow flying into his face visor and cawing at him angrily.  
  
He couldn't. He absolutely couldn't.  
  
This was one thing that being Efficient just couldn't counter. Nothing he could even invent could even help. Chances were the 'perfect weapon' would just explode in his face or just flat out break the first chance he came near either Murphy.  
  
...There was a reason their hometown had been designated the "Murphy Exclusion Zone" for so many years as it was. Armsmaster's only hope was that the Murphys would leave before Brockton Bay became the SECOND exclusion zone.  


* * *

  
  
Later that night, a new cape made her debut on the scene by joining Uber and Leet's spin off show, "Scrap Yard Demolition!" Her name? Corviid. Her powers? A Master ability concerning birds of all kinds.  
  
Elsewhere, a certain Sophia Hess would finally learn that all of that day's troubles had been due to a single boy... And she did not take it lightly one bit at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Taylor alt-triggered with Bird control over Insect control.

**Author's Note:**

> A story idea that wouldn't leave me be. Might write more for this every now and then. *Shrugs*


End file.
